Seduced by the Dark Side

I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for playing the good guy in video games. There are several personal reasons for my choice to be the hero, including

• Evil choices are usually very two-dimensional and immature. The good guy gets to risk his life in a burning orphanage. The bad guy farts in someone's face (I'm looking at you, Fable).
• The good guy could exist in the real world. Bad guys are usually so bad that someone would have given a hero a quest to kill them. In one of the Elder Scrolls games I once butchered an entire town just to see how the game would react. They still wanted me to go slay a dragon or kill 10 large rats in a woman's basement.
• I lightly role-play my characters. I always start out with a character concept in mind, but I always end up adopting the character's decisions as my own. Sometimes that means I won't do the trivial stuff a good guy would do (like gathering 5 mushrooms), but usually it means that I can't maintain the antihero character I'd wanted to play.
• The story for the bad guy is usually just a watered down version of the hero's. Stories are usually built with the assumption that you'll be a savior. When they create a morality meter, tiptoeing on the side of evil usually just means you miss out on some of the good stuff, but in the end your decisions didn't matter.
• Evil paths usually serve no purpose. To me, the best "evil" in a story is when a character sees his ends justifying his means, or when he believes that he is accomplishing a "good" no one else can see. In games, evil characters are usually just childish brutes with limited social graces and a complete, meaningless disregard for the well-being of others. There's no pursuit, just exercising their power in a world with no real consequences.

Now there are some games that try really hard to find a balance. The Bioshock series truly finds a balance. Do you kill these tainted little girls so that you can better protect yourself and escape rapture, or do you free them and sleep better at night, knowing that you've sacrificed power to give these mysterious girls a chance at a real life? I never could get myself to harvest them, but I knew that killing them wasn't just evil to be evil, but a means to an end. That is the sort of "evil" decisions a game should give you.

So why bring this up? Well I finally broke down and bought a PS3, and one of the games I've always wanted to play is the Infamous series. I'm mostly going in to these blind, but as I understand it you need to choose which path you're going to take in the game and stick to it. Both paths have their benefits and weaknesses, with a (hopefully) decent ending for each.

Rather than playing the halo-toting good guy, I really think I'm going to see what awaits me at the end of the path I've never taken. This will be even more difficult because I'm pretty sure the evil powers have a chance to cause collateral damage. However, once I do that first evil mission I'm going to be in it for the long haul.

As a guy who will sacrifice 20 minutes of progress because I killed an innocent and reloaded the game, this will be a very weird experience. I won't be killing because of the whole ant-boot metaphor, but going in to this knowing that my character will probably let people die is something I've never considered.

However, this decision is almost a necessary evil. My playtime is very limited lately, and I want to sit down and just play through a game without worrying about my good meter dipping too low because of an errant explosion. I'm hoping that going down the darker path will give me a satisfying story, get me out of my comfort zone, and even make me appreciate experiencing the side of a story I've never really seen before.


See you tomorrow!

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